Worst Box Breaks Ever?
 

I broke a box of 2021 Heritage yesterday and it was easily the worst break ever. The box topper was a nobody common, there was one (1) insert card (a common card with the French variation) and the autograph/relic in the box was a Clubhouse Joey Votto (unsigned). No variations, no other inserts, nothing. Base card-wise, I didn't even get a Mike Trout. I'm just glad the box was a gift because if I'd paid over $100 for that experience I'd have been profoundly disappointed.

So what was your worst box break ever in this era of inserts?

I don't do a ton of breaks.. I had a real stinker 2021 Metal hockey break. I can't even tell you the best cards. It was completely unmemorable. The last O-Pee-Chee hockey break I did wasn't great at the top end, but it made up for it in just a ton of solid players. Hockey seems to be a problem for me, I've done a few breaks and I don't think I've ever pulled a relic of that was vaguely interesting.. and no autos. Granted these were just run of the mill hobby breaks.. but I think I'm on the low end of the bell curve generally. lol.

I once started opening packs in a new box of 1990 Leaf in my friend's store looking for the Frank Thomas, and you guessed it, went through an entire box without getting one.

Joe Theismann 11/18/85

Unfortunately that i similar to every box I have opened in the last 20 years.:(

The only bigger hit I got was in the late 90s. I pulled a Mickey Mantle insert that was a few hundred at the time. Now you can pick it up for a few dollars.

this! A major factor in me stopping the purchase of packs/boxes, along with the rising cost (even at that time 99-00, it's worse now)!

I felt ripped off after just about every box I broke open, spending anywhere from $40-80 and having a stack of base cards and a few inserts that nobody cared about a few months after they were pulled.

I much prefer buying what I want now. I miss out on the chance to pull a huge card, but it never really happened much before, so it's a fair trade.

I saw this same sentiment on Twitter or Facebook. They said that 2021 Heritage was the worst Heritage product to be released, and they weren't sure they would ever buy Heritage again.

I stopped buying boxes in 2004 or 05. Decided I would rather spend $150 on a single nice card that I would probably never sell. Wish I had made that decision much earlier!

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G930A using Tapatalk

Modern has a number of deficiencies from my perspective:

Confusing Multiplicity of Cards: Just the base issue of 2021 Topps had this (per baseballcardpedia):
Gimmicks (Tier 1) 75 - 1:79 1:69 ? 1:33 1:17
Gimmicks (Tier 2) 25 - 1:2348 1:2049 ? 1:966 1:492
Gimmicks (Tier 3) 5 - 1:88,187 1:74,986 ? 1:35,457 1:18,510
Gold Foil 330 - N/A N/A 1:2 N/A N/A
Rainbow Foil 330 - 1:10 1:10 1:2 1:4 1:2
Royal Blue 330 - N/A W N/A one-per-pack W two-per-pack W
Yellow 330 - N/A WGN N/A N/A N/A
Purple 330 - N/A MEI N/A N/A N/A
Gold 330 2021 1:27 1:23 ? 1:11 1:6
Green Foil 330 499 ? ? ? ? ?
Orange Foil 330 299 ? ? ? ? ?
Red Foil 330 199 ? ? ? ? ?
Vintage Stock 330 99 1:554 1:485 ? 1:229 1:116
Independence Day 330 76 1:703 1:615 ? 1:290 1:147
Black 330 70 1:175 N/A ? N/A N/A
Platinum Anniversary 330 70 ? 1:668 ? 1:314 1:160
Father’s Day Blue 330 50 1:1067 1:935 ? 1:440 1:224
Mother’s Day Hot Pink 330 50 1:1067 1:935 ? 1:440 1:224
Memorial Day Camouflage 330 25 1:2134 1:1875 ? 1:881 1:446
Platinum 330 one-of-one 1:52,912 1:46,867 ? 1:23,564 1:11,106
Printing Plates 330 four for each 1:13,324 1:11,717 ? 1:5516 1:2777
Advanced Stats ? 300 1:228 ? ? ? 1:48
Clear

That is way too many parallels to keep track of and chase after.

Impossibility of Completion: With all of the parallels, some of them numbered in the handful, it is very tough to collect a player. I tried to collect the rainbow of Errol Spence cards in the 2018 Leaf issue but quit in disgust when it became apparent that I was not going to get the 1:1, 1:2 or 1:3 cards. Very frustrating for a collector.

Too Many Issues: The 2021 releases:

2021 Absolute
2021 Bowman
2021 Bowman Chrome
2021 Bowman Chrome Mega Box
2021 Bowman Chrome X
2021 Bowman Inception
2021 Bowman Platinum
2021 Bowman Sapphire Chrome
2021 Bowman Sterling
2021 Bowman Transcendent
2021 Diamond Kings
2021 Donruss
2021 Donruss Optic
2021 Finest
2021 Finest Flashbacks
2021 Panini Immaculate
2021 Panini Mosaic
2021 Panini Prizm
2021 Select
2021 Spectra
2021 Stadium Club
2021 Topps
2021 Topps Allen & Ginter
2021 Topps Archives Snapshots
2021 Topps Chrome
2021 Topps Chrome Ben Baller Edition
2021 Topps Definitive Collection
2021 Topps Diamond Icons
2021 Topps Fire
2021 Topps Five Star
2021 Topps Gold Label
2021 Topps Gypsy Queen
2021 Topps Heritage
2021 Topps Heritage Minor League
2021 Topps Inception
2021 Topps Luminaries
2021 Topps Mickey Mantle Collection
2021 Topps Museum Collection
2021 Topps Opening Day
2021 Topps Pro Debut
2021 Topps Rip
2021 Topps Sapphire Chrome
2021 Topps Sterling
2021 Topps Tier One
2021 Topps Transcendent Hall Of Fame
2021 Topps Tribute
2021 Topps Update
2021 Triple Threads

So many choices I don't know what to collect. Choose the right set and you get a $20,000 rookie card. Choose the wrong set and you get a $5 rookie card of the same guy.

Worthless Shiny Crap: Sorry, but that's the truth with regard to the base sets. It is still just trash to throw away. You open a box and it devalues like a new car just driven off the lot. I opened a case of the 2020 Heritage because I love the 1971 design. Now I have a small stack of cards worth saving and a 5000 count box of worthless junk I will eventually toss into a recycling bin.

Obnoxious Asshole 'Investors'. We may have a lot of weirdos and social defectives in the vintage field but the modern guys, it's like they are all competing to see who can be the biggest douche.

It's Gambling. Much of modern, not all certainly, but a big piece of it and certainly the visible part in breaks and investment discussions, is gambling on a key hit in a pack/box/case, storage of certain cards for potential future value, and holding the rest in case someone unknown becomes valuable. I don't see people taking a lot of pleasure in piecing together base sets, probably because you can just buy a run on the cheap. Now that might have been the case with earlier cards too had we had Internet access to material, I don't know, but we did not. It just seems wrong to have so much of the product effectively tossed aside. I would rather they make an issue that is nothing but the hits and the superstar variations and just admit that no one wants the rest. Pinnacle sort of did that with the select certified sets, and that worked out so well they went bankrupt...

But Adam, get any and all of it into a PSA 10 slab and it sells, from what I can see. This accounts for a staggering percentage of PSA submissions and its multimillion card backlog.

Your list is missing Topps Allen & Ginter Black, Topps 206, Topps Now, Topps Advent, Topps Chrome Black, Topps Living Set, Topps Throwback Thursday... and maybe other internet releases.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G930A using Tapatalk

Heritage has devolved into a trash heap product, and forget about hits.
When packs routinely show up at Big Lots in the children's cheap toy carousel you know its garbage.
RayB

Back in the 90s I bought 2 boxes of '84 Topps and not one Mattingly

I totally agree about the number of products being silly. It was my understanding that when MLB went to a single licensee, the idea was that they were trying to limit the number of products. That always seemed silly to me, as a healthy marketplace where different companies all put forth their products, and the best ones rose to the top, was a much better thing. Now we just have Topps (and soon Fanatics) producing stupid silly numbers of products. Personally I still have fun opening base Topps and hand collating a set the way I used to. It costs about 5-10x what it would cost to just buy the complete set from Target, but it's a lot more fun. The last two or three years I have gotten it to where I only needed 5-10 cards to finish my sets, and I've bought or traded for those last few cards. But the rest have come from opening packs. Occasionally I get a fun specialty card, but those I view just as bonuses. I really don't care that much about the myriad of inserts. I have started just stacking the inserts up in the box at the end of my set, and there they sit. I suppose if I ever found out that one of the inserts I got was unexpectedly a big deal, I would sell it off. But for now I just pile them up.
kevin

HaHa. I don't think I've bought any boxes in the insert era, so that would have been my story to.

Except, I bought 3 rack boxes, and didn't get one Mattingly....or Strawberry......or 2nd year Boggs...or even Nolan Ryan...LOL.

They were obviously searched.

Then of course there's the notorious early printings of the 1981 Donruss, where you'd get about 50 Different cards in the entire box, and about half of them were miscut.

Best return on investment? I remember buying up boxes of 1977-78 WHA OPC Hockey for less then 100 bucks a box in the late 80's, and pulling like a dozen Gordie Howe's and Bobby Hulls out of each box.

:D

I just broke a box of 2021 Heritage high - Did not get a complete set either - I was short 6 cards for a complete set and I got 3 base doubles. I got 8 sp's, a #/572, one action card, and a few inserts. My "hit" was a paper napkin looking relic of W Contreras (Cubs) my box topper was a Ron Santo - I hate oversized cards so its kind of blah. I also get the Cavan Biggio card they failed to include in the regular boxes of heritages.

The hits etc were as expected - my biggest two beefs are - the QC - the cards are dinged up pretty good. I wouldn't grade them - but in an age of PSA 9/10 the card manufacturers should do a better job. Also I wish they would just give you a complete set. I'm not buying another box to get 6 cards so I'll have to hunt them. Maybe they want that - but still kind of annoying.

Isn't this mostly why the modern stuff gets sold through online Breakers? The people buying in can often focus on a particular team to go after cards of more desirable players and increases their chances of getting some better cards. Plus, when was the last time you heard of someone buying a box or pack on their own and actually pulling a big card? I know of no one that's ever done that. Always seems it only happens to people that get lucky on breaks, or buy from a dealer/distributor who buys wholesale and opens cases for the top cards. I've often wondered if the "better" stuff isn't saved for the big wholesale distributors/Breakers, and the stuff you get at Target/Walmart is filled with mostly crap, on purpose. Just like some TPGs tend to cater to their big customers, I've often wondered if the "better" product isn't often steered towards those bigger customers. When a lot of those new products come out, my understanding is that the really big cards that are going to be available in them are pretty much known in advance. So when they first hit the public, especially product sold through Breakers where everything is shown online, those big cards are often known when they get pulled and the info gets out there. So possibly dealers/distributors start letting the balance of that product they have left go to the general public once they'd heard most of the big pulls are already found and gone.

Like a few years ago when Ohtani was a rookie, I forget the specific issue, but there was going to be a 1/1 special rookie card (auto if I remember correctly) of his in this specific issue that was going to be coming out. A few weeks before the actual release I seem to remember there was an offer made online (I want to say through Blowout?) that supposedly some Japanese fan/investor wanted this card, and was offering to initially pay $60K to whoever pulled it, providing they sold it to him/her by a specific date after the product was first released, and that the card would grade no less than a 9.0 by a specified TPG. Needless to say, everybody wanted to buy this product. Once it came out, I had heard that the special 1/1 rookie wasn't found right away, but didn't follow up to see when/where it eventually was found, and if whoever did find it took advantage of the $60K offer originally on the table.

Had discussed with a friend and we wondered if this "offer" wasn't actually money being offered by/through the card manufacturer to boost product sales. And even with all the hype, the fact this card wasn't immedialtely found would make you wonder if the card manufacturer didn't somehow delay it's actual distribution to keep up those sales. You know the Breakers were selling and opening this product as fast as they could, fearing that once that Ohtani rookie was found and word got out, interest in that product would quickly start to drop, along with what people would be willing to pay for a spot in the breaks of that product going forward.

As Adam noted earlier, one of the biggest things involving modern card sales, especially through Breakers, is the gambling aspect. And for a huge portion of these people that buy into these breaks, that gambling aspect is like an uncontrollable addiction. And now with the pandemic surge in card values for cards like Trout, Brady, Lebron, and other rookies, it is going to fuel these "gamblers" to keep going after these rookie cards every year to hopefully hit their one big lottery ticket pull. On one level, it is kind of like how people would hoard Gregg Jefferies, and other '80s rookies cards, with the plan that they'd be able to retire when they'd go to sell all those rookie cards in 20-30 years. (And we all know how that ended up working out!)

Remains to be seen how things go forward in the new/modern card part of the hobby, and how and when they change. If you look back at this hobby of ours over the past 50-60-70 years, the changes have been ongoing, and often dramatic. So it is definitely not a question of if it will change again, but when.

For now, the current card producers have learned from mistakes of the '80s and '90s. They still produce a ridiculous number of products each year, but now instead of producing a million of all the exact same Gregg Jefferies rookie cards, they've learned to produce limited numbers of new rookie cards that won't lose their value over time (like a 1/1 Ohtani rookie auto). They were smart enough (or maybe just dumb luck) to recognize on the vintage side that the fewer examples of desirable cards out there, especially rookies, generally created a higher value for such cards due to low supply of those cards to meet the demand. This in turn keeps the perceived values of these limited quantity modern rookies up there, so as to keep attracting the "gamblers" to continue going after these (what I call) manufactured rarities. It also means they still have to throw in a lot of worthless crap to make these limited edition manufactured rarities look that much more rare. So for the time being I guess you can expect to get mostly crappy cards when you buy and open new products yourself.

For now, the current model is working well for the new/modern card part of the hobby. Curious to see what may happen once Fanatics takes over card production in just a few years. Will they try to continue what Topps and Panini have been doing, or will they go in a different direction? Will Breakers (and even TPGs) continue to be as big a part of the hobby as they currently are, or will Fanatics try to take over everything? And then factor in what the effects might be once we finally start to get past this pandemic and things start to return to normal, or whatever the new normal ends up being. This should be interesting to see unfold.

At face value that list looks like a ton of glut, but honestly 65%-75% of those releases named have solid to die hard followings. I have a family member that works in video game development and effectively acts as the face of a popular franchise and actively engages the community. I must have read a variation this response a thousand times in his social media postings and I think it's very relevant here. In essence:

"Not everything we create is for you specifically. We have millions of fans that all want something different in their experience. Just because we create something you didn't want or ask for, doesn't mean someone else didn't."

I don't open 95% of those products listed, but then again - they weren't made for me and my tastes.

My worst box break ever was a case of 1991 Fleer...back in 1991. I was still a teenager, so cut me some slack.

I wound up spending forever and a day collating sets. My eyes still hurt from all that YELLOW

While I pretty much focus on vintage these days, you can't get the pack opening experience.

So I typically get one box of modern a year (or maybe a couple blasters)...but my mindset going in is that I'm paying for the entertainment of opening packs. I have ZERO expectations of getting the same value out of the box that it costs to buy it.

I usually come out of a box break with a couple interesting cards I keep for my collection. A card or two to sell on ebay to get a few dollars back, and then the rest of the cards go in to the recycle bin because it makes me happier to keep a smaller, organized collection than have big boxes of commons I don't care about. But it's FUN to open packs and dream of hitting a BIG card.

That being said, I can pretty much get the same experience opening 80's junk wax. I have an LCS not far away that sometimes sells late 80's and early 90's Topps, Donruss, Fleer for $15.00 a box. I enjoy that about as much as opening a $100 box of modern, especially if there is a chance at one of those early autograph cards, Elite inserts, etc. So I'll pick those up when I can.

In fact, a previous poster mentioned 1991 Fleer. I literally have a wax box of that now that I'm going through. So much yellow, that when I hit the occasional black bordered Pro-Vision (which are still pretty much worthless), it feels like a nice "hit".

hahahaahaha,

I see what you did there. And it was for many a Skins' fan too.

Forgot Bowman First Edition... lol

That may be true but it leaves a collector in an impossible position of trying to pick which set(s) appeal to him and which set(s) are worth the substantial expense of either buying outright or busting wax to collect. At the most extreme, 1993 UD SP Jeter vs. 1993 Topps Jeter. I'd feel really bummed if i'd chose the flagship Topps card over the SP card.

I don’t understand why. Those were two different products at the time and priced pretty far apart in pack form.

It’s not an impossible position. Collect what you like and what you feel you can afford.